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The Framework and the Big Ideas of e-Business
Abstract
In order to gain an integrated view of e-business (considered synonymous with e-commerce) and the opportunities it offers in the development of organizational strategies, a comprehensive framework of the activities in the field is presented. The 5Cs framework consists of 5 domains. The top three of them, the superstructure, represent the economic and social activities of commerce, collaboration, and communication. The two supporting domains are those of the technological infrastructure: connection and computation. Analyzing the activities within these domains, we identify the ten big ideas that have influenced the development of e-business in a decisive way and that exert continuing influence on the way information systems are used strategically. The identified activities and ideas will serve to innovate in the future development of e-business as a growing component of economic and societal development.
... Similarly, considering the interaction of e-government status, network facilities foster e-business adoptions by β = 0.413 at a 10% degree of error. Importantly, these results are supported by the former finding that focused on the enhancement of e-governance with high network facilities certainly enhances growth and interactions beyond a single border [73][74][75][76][77]. ...
Nowadays, in the complex business network system, the interaction of firms across borders is facing several challenges. Many studies in the literature also suggest numerous approaches to overcome these challenges. However, a few of the obstacles for internationalizing firms were studied and the challenges are increasing against firms’ growth opportunities cross-border. Taking this into account, the present research emphasized the roles of enterprises’ e-business adoptions of countries on cross-border firms’ internationalization by drawing from network theory and technology–organization–environment frames. By employing a fixed effect model to 365 enterprises, leaders’ attitudes of preferring technology-intensive firms, network infrastructure, risk-averting attitudes, country’s market size, multilingual services, e-government status, threats from competitors, reliable utility sources, human capital quality, costs of adoptions and telecom services enrichments, and costs of adopting different online services need to be taken into account before internationalization of born global companies.
... Ancangan lain untuk interpretasi dan penjelasan perihal E-Commerce, awalnya dari model 5-C (Zwass, 2014). Model ini menjelaskan E-Commerce dengan lima kategori kegiatan/aktivitas yang awalnya memakai huruf "C": 1. Commerce (Perdagangan) Di pasar elektronik terdapat penyesuaian antara pelanggan dan distributor, pemilihan ketentuan transaksi, dan fasilitasi transaksi peralihan. ...
Buku ERP ini mengacu pada pendekatan konsep teoritis dan contoh penerapan. Buku ini terdiri atas 13 bab yang dibahas secara rinci, diantaranya: Dasar-Dasar E-Bisnis Dan Implementasinya, Memahami Dasar E-Commerce, Infrastruktur E-Bisnis, Pemetaan Proses Dengan Sistem ERP, Manajemen Supply Chain Implementasinya, E-Procurement, E-Marketing, Strategi Pemasaran, Customer Relationship Management, ERP dan Penerapannya, Solusi Software untuk E-Business, Proteksi dan Keamanan e-business, Perkembangan E-Bussines dan E-commerce.
Intellectual Property, which encompasses marks, is a valuable intangible asset that requires safeguarding. Marks, which serve as indicators to differentiate the goods or services of one business from those of others, play a crucial role in gaining a competitive edge, particularly in the realm of e-marketplace platforms. However, the protection of mark rights in Indonesian e-marketplace platforms is far from adequate. The fact that three Indonesian e-marketplaces have been included in the USTR's Notorious Market List for the 2018-2022 editions, along with Indonesia's inclusion in the USTR Priority Watch List during the same period, undeniably demonstrates the insufficiency of protection measures. The protection of marks thus can be examined from two perspectives: repressive, which includes blacklisting measures; and preventive, which includes whitelisting measures.
To obtain the necessary information on this issue, the research method used in this study is normative legal research. The information used is secondary data including primary, secondary, and tertiary legal sources. To support it, primary data is also used. Legal intrepretations or hermeneutic methods were then used to analyze the data.
Research findings show that there is uncertainty about the legal status of mark owners in the e-marketplace platforms. This is due to differences in the definition of mark owners in the laws and rules governing e-marketplaces. As the result, mark owners have been unfairly positioned in e-marketplaces, both in terms of repressive and preventive legal protections. An alignment based on comprehensive understanding of an e-marketplace, could provide a better legal definition for the mark owners. Furthermore, based on this deeper runderstanding, the concept of fair legal protection could then be developed for the mark owners in the e-marketplace platform, repressively and preventively. It is hoped that Indonesia will soon be taken off the Priority Watch List through a fairer preventive and repressive intellectual property legal protection.
Bir piyasanın temel işlevi, bilginin alıcılar ve satıcılar arasında daha sorunsuz bir şekilde akmasını sağlayarak talep ve arz eşleşmesini kolaylaştırmaktır. Bu bağlamda, elektronik pazarlar çevrimiçi işlem platformları yaparak hem alıcıların hem de satıcıların elde edebileceği birçok avantajın var olduğunu göstermiştir. Tüketiciler, fiyatlar ve ürünler hakkındaki bilgileri çok kolay ve hızlı bir şekilde, sadece bir “tıklama” ile bulabilmektedir. E-ticaret platformlarındaki satıcılar, diğer satıcıların fiyat stratejilerini görebilmekte ve karşılaştırabilmektedir, dolayısıyla pazar daha şeffaftır. Satıcılar, ilgili menü maliyetlerini ödemeden fiyatlarını değiştirebilmektedirler. E-ticaret platformundaki satıcıların kar marjları rekabet etmekte böylece hepsi maliyet üzerinden fiyatlandırma yapmak zorunda kalmaktadır. Satıcılar birçok farklı ülkede bulunan tüketicilere ulaşabilmekte ve aynı zamanda tüketiciler de dünyanın neresinde olursa olsun bir e-ticaret platformunda yer alan bir satıcıya ulaşabilmektedir. Bir e-ticaret platformunu kullanan çok sayıda alıcı ve satıcı bulunmaktadır. E-ticaret platformu aynı (homojen) ürünlerden oluşmaktadır. Bu koşullar dikkate alındığında e-ticaret platformlarının piyasa yapısının iktisadın ideal olarak tanımladığı Tam Rekabet Piyasasına yakınsadığı görülmektedir.
p>The aims of this research is to find an Islamic eCommerce disrupted strategy using 5C model. Our methodologies is a qualitative descriptive to evaluate and describe aspects of innovation based on 5C model. We propose a systematic approach to identify disruptive strategies of Prophet Muhammad displacing the big incumbent market and also provide commercialize the strategy for developing and implementing Islamic Commerce to be electronics. Hijrah is the best disruptive approach that was proven by Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) with the closing of the Bani Qainuqa market. He implemented 4C model commerce, collaboration, communication, connection, and only computation that He can’t. The state art of this research are the customers not only ‘go shopping’, but literally are shopping. While the sellers not only ‘go selling’ but Hijrah with the great intention. It is not only about adopting technology but also as a disrupted strategy.
Tujuan dari penelitian ini adalah untuk menemukan sebuah strategi diruptif eCommerce Islam menggunakan model 5C (Commerce, Collaboration, Communication, Connection, and Computing). Metodologi yang kami gunakan adalah deskriptif kualitatif, untuk mengevaluasi dan menggambarkan aspek inovasi berdasarkan model 5C. Kami menawarkan sebuah pendekatan sistematik untuk mengenali strategi disruptif Nabi Muhammad dalam menggusur pasar besar milik petahana dan juga menyediakan strategi komersil dalam mengembangkan dan menerapkan perdagangan Islam secara elektronik (Islamic e-commerce). Hijrah adalah pendekatan distruptif terbaik yang pernah dibuktikan oleh Nabi Muhammad Saw dengan menutup pasar Bani Qainuqa. Nabi Muhammad Saw menjalankan model 4C yaitu perdagangan, kolaborasi, komunikasi, koneksi, dan hanya komputasi yang tidak dapat dilakukan. Hasil temuan-temuannya menunjukan bahwa pelanggan tidak hanya untuk ‘berbelanja’, tapi ada tujuan lain memahami kaidah Ilmu sebelum amal dalam berbelanja. Sedangkan penjual tidak sekedar ‘berjualan’ namun berhijrah dengan nilai yang lebih agung. Hal ini tidak hanya perihal penggunaan teknologi tapi juga sebagai strategi disruptif.</p
The process of user-centered innovation: how it can benefit both users and manufacturers and how its emergence will bring changes in business models and in public policy.
Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all.The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive.
Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.
Understanding what motivates participation is a central theme in the
research on open source software (OSS) development. Our study contributes
by revealing how the different motivations of OSS developers are
interrelated, how these motivations influence participation leading
to performance, and how past performance influences subsequent motivations.
Drawing on theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, we develop
a theoretical model relating the motivations, participation, and
performance of OSS developers. We evaluate our model using survey
and archival data collected from a longitudinal field study of software
developers in the Apache projects. Our results reveal several important
findings. First, we find that developers' motivations are not independent
but rather are related in complex ways. Being paid to contribute
to Apache projects is positively related to developers' status motivations
but negatively related to their use-value motivations. Perhaps surprisingly,
we find no evidence of diminished intrinsic motivation in the presence
of extrinsic motivations; rather, status motivations enhance intrinsic
motivations. Second, we find that different motivations have an impact
on participation in different ways. Developers' paid participation
and status motivations lead to above-average contribution levels,
but use-value motivations lead to below-average contribution levels,
and intrinsic motivations do not significantly impact average contribution
levels. Third, we find that developers' contribution levels positively
impact their performance rankings. Finally, our results suggest that
past-performance rankings enhance developers' subsequent status motivations.
The increased popularity of social networking sites, such as Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter, has opened opportunities for new business models for electronic commerce, often referred to as social commerce. Social commerce involves using Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure to support online interactions and user contributions to assist in the acquisition of products and services. Social media technologies not only provide a new platform for entrepreneurs to innovate but also raise a variety of new issues for e-commerce researchers that require the development of new theories. This could become one of the most challenging research arenas in the coming decade. The purpose of this introduction is to present a framework that integrates several elements in social commerce research and to summarize the papers included in this special issue. The framework includes six key elements for classifying social commerce research: research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods. The proposed framework is valuable in defining the scope and identifying potential research issues in social commerce. We also explain how the papers included in this special issue fit into the proposed research framework.
The technique of collaborative filtering is especially successful in generating personalized recommendations. More than a decade of research has resulted in numerous algorithms, although no comparison of the different strategies has been made. In fact, a universally accepted way of evaluating a collaborative filtering algorithm does not exist yet. In this work, we compare different techniques found in the literature, and we study the characteristics of each one, highlighting their principal strengths and weaknesses. Several experiments have been performed, using the most popular metrics and algorithms. Moreover, two new metrics designed to measure the precision on good items have been proposed. The results have revealed the weaknesses of many algorithms in extracting information from user profiles especially under sparsity conditions. We have also confirmed the good results of SVD-based techniques already reported by other authors. As an alternative, we present a new approach based on the interpretation of the tendencies or differences between users and items. Despite its extraordinary simplicity, in our experiments, it obtained noticeably better results than more complex algorithms. In fact, in the cases analyzed, its results are at least equivalent to those of the best approaches studied. Under sparsity conditions, there is more than a 20% improvement in accuracy over the traditional user-based algorithms, while maintaining over 90% coverage. Moreover, it is much more efficient computationally than any other algorithm, making it especially adequate for large amounts of data.
Customer-centric business makes the needs and resources of individual customers the starting point for planning new products and services or improving existing ones. While customer-centricity has received recent attention in the marketing literature, technologies to enable customer-centricity have been largely ignored in research and theory development. In this paper, we describe one enabling technology-wikis. Wiki is a Web-based collaboration technology designed to allow anyone to update any information posted to a wiki-based Web site. As such, wikis can be used to enable customers to not only access but also change the organization's Web presence, creating previously unheard of opportunities for joint content development and "peer production" of Web content. At the same time, such openness may make the organization vulnerable to Web site defacing, destruction of intellectual property, and general chaos. In this zone of tension-between opportunity and possible failure-an increasing number of organizations are experimenting with the use of wikis and the wiki way to engage customers. Three cases of organizations using wikis to foster customer-centricity are described, with each case representing an ever-increasing level of customer engagement. An examination of the three cases reveals six characteristics that affect customer engagement-community custodianship, goal alignment among contributors, value-adding processes, emerging layers of participation, critical mass of management and monitoring activity, and technologies in which features are matched to assumptions about how the community collaborates. Parallels between our findings and those evolving in studies of the open source software movement are drawn.
The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that self-organizing production communities can produce high-quality information-based products. Research on Wikipedia has proceeded largely atheoretically, focusing on (1) the diversity in members’ knowledge bases as a determinant of Wikipedia’s content quality, (2) the task-related conflicts that occur during the collaborative authoring process, and (3) the different roles members play in Wikipedia. We develop a theoretical model that explains how these three factors interact to determine the quality of Wikipedia articles. The results from the empirical study of 96 Wikipedia articles suggest that (1) diversity should be encouraged, as the creative abrasion that is generated when cognitively diverse members engage in task-related conflict leads to higher-quality articles, (2) task conflict should be managed, as conflict -- notwithstanding its contribution to creative abrasion -- can negatively affect group output, and (3) groups should maintain a balance of both administrative- and content-oriented members, as both contribute to the collaborative process.
By reducing the costs of coordination, information technology will lead to an overall shift toward proportionately more use of markets—rather than hierarchies—to coordinate economic activity.
Recommendation agents (RAs) are software agents that elicit the interests or preferences of individual consumers for products, either explicitly or implicitly, and make recommendations accordingly. RAs have the potential to support and improve the quality of the decisions consumers make when searching for and selecting products online. They can reduce the information overload facing consumers, as well as the complexity of online searches. Prior research on RAs has focused mostly on developing and evaluating different underlying algorithms that generate recommendations. This paper instead identifies other important aspects of RAs, namely RA use, RA characteristics, provider credibility, and factors related to product, user, and user-RA interaction, which influence users' decision-making processes and outcomes, as well as their evaluation of RAs. It goes beyond generalized models, such as TAM, and identifies the RA-specific features, such as RA input, process, and output design characteristics, that affect users' evaluations, including their assessments of the usefulness and ease-of-use of RA applications. Based on a review of existing literature on e-commerce RAs, this paper develops a conceptual model with 28 propositions derived from five theoretical perspectives. The propositions help answer the two research questions: (1) How do RA use, RA characteristics, and other factors influence consumer decision making processes and outcomes? (2) How do RA use, RA characteristics, and other factors influence users' evaluations of RAs? By identifying the critical gaps between what we know and what we need to know, this paper identifies potential areas of future research for scholars. It also provides advice to information systems practitioners concerning the effective design and development of RAs.
This article introduces the idea of brand community. A brand community is a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand. Grounded in both classic and contemporary sociology and consumer behavior, this article uses ethnographic and computer mediated environment data to explore the characteristics, processes, and particularities of three brand communities (those centered on Ford Bronco, Macintosh, and Saab). These brand communities exhibit three traditional markers of community: shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility. The commercial and mass-mediated ethos in which these communities are situated affects their character and structure and gives rise to their particularities. Implications for branding, sociological theories of community, and consumer behavior are offered. Copyright 2001 by the University of Chicago.
We analyze how online reviews are used to evaluate the effectiveness of product differentiation strategies based on the theories of hyperdifferentiation and resonance marketing. Hyperdifferentiation says that firms can now produce almost anything that appeals to consumers and they can manage the complexity of the increasingly diverse product portfolios that result. Resonance marketing says that informed consumers will purchase products that they actually truly want. When consumers become more informed, firms that provide highly differentiated products should experience higher growth rates than firms with less differentiated offerings. We construct measures of product positioning based on online ratings and find supportive evidence using sales data from the craft beer industry. In particular, we find that the variance of ratings and the strength of the most positive quartile of reviews play a significant role in determining which new products grow fastest in the market-place. This supports our expectations for resonance marketing.
The increased popularity of social networking sites, such as Linkedln, Facebook, and Twitter, has opened opportunities for new business models for electronic commerce, often referred to as social commerce. Social commerce involves using Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure to support online interactions and user contributions to assist in the acquisition of products and services. Social media technologies not only provide a new platform for entrepreneurs to innovate but also raise a variety of new issues for e-commerce researchers that require the development of new theories. This could become one of the most challenging research arenas in the coming decade. The purpose of this introduction is to present a framework that integrates several elements in social commerce research and to summarize the papers included in this special issue. The framework includes six key elements for classifying social commerce research: research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods. The proposed framework is valuable in defining the scope and identifying potential research issues in social commerce. We also explain how the papers included in this special issue fit into the proposed research framework.
Customer-centric business makes the needs and resources of individual
customers the starting point for planning new products and services or improving
existing ones. While customer-centricity has received recent attention in the marketing
literature, technologies to enable customer-centricity have been largely ignored
in research and theory development. In this paper, we describe one enabling technology—
wikis. Wiki is a Web-based collaboration technology designed to allow anyone
to update any information posted to a wiki-based Web site. As such, wikis can be used
to enable customers to not only access but also change the organization’s Web presence,
creating previously unheard of opportunities for joint content development and
“peer production” of Web content. At the same time, such openness may make the
organization vulnerable to Web site defacing, destruction of intellectual property, and
general chaos. In this zone of tension—between opportunity and possible failure—an
increasing number of organizations are experimenting with the use of wikis and the
wiki way to engage customers. Three cases of organizations using wikis to foster
customer-centricity are described, with each case representing an ever-increasing level
of customer engagement. An examination of the three cases reveals six characteristics
that affect customer engagement—community custodianship, goal alignment
among contributors, value-adding processes, emerging layers of participation, critical
mass of management and monitoring activity, and technologies in which features
are matched to assumptions about how the community collaborates. Parallels between
our findings and those evolving in studies of the open source software movement
are drawn.
Business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic commerce survived the near-disastrous dot.com market crash in March of 2000 and has emerged as an integral component of doing business. Studies conducted before 2000, when companies had little experience with e-commerce, found that there were differences in pricing strategies and search and menu costs between the Internet and the conventional (brick-and-mortar) channel of distribution. The present study examines pricing data collected during a more mature period when companies routinely used both channels to sell products. The study utilizes data from the Internet and from conventional retailers for a bundle of over-the-counter pharmaceutical products. It finds that prices but not total cost are lower on the Internet, and therefore that shopping for such products on the Internet is likely to be a convenience issue. It also finds, contrary to expectations, that price changes are not more frequent or smaller on the Internet than on the conventional channel, whereas cost and price dispersion are greater. Finally, it discusses the pricing strategies of stores that have both Internet and conventional channels.
Integrating the traditional and structural approaches to information load measurement, this research investigates the impact of information overload on decision strategy. Decision strategy refers to whether a consumer uses a recommendation agent and the consumer's reactance behavior to the agent advice (whether the chosen product was the same or different from the recommended product). The research further shows the effects of information overload and decision strategy on choice quality, choice confidence, and e-store interactivity. The experiment, which involved 466 consumers, had three levels for the number of alternatives (6, 18, and 30), three levels for the number of attributes (15, 25, and 35), and two different attribute distributions across alternatives (proportional vs. disproportional). The results contribute to the literature of information overload and decision support systems by underscoring that (1) the relationship between information load and perceived overload is curvilinear, (2) information overload augments recommendation agent use and conformance to the recommendation, (3) the positive impact of using a recommendation agent on choice quality increases with information overload, and (4) consumers become more confident in their choices and perceive higher e-store interactivity when they conform to product recommendations. As such, the results help to explain some conflicting findings in the information overload literature and contribute to practice by highlighting the importance of decision aid tools in information-intensive environments.
This paper examines how product and consumer characteristics moderate the influence of online consumer reviews on product sales using data from the video game industry. The findings indicate that online reviews are more influential for less popular games and games whose players have greater Internet experience. The paper shows differential impact of consumer reviews across products in the same product category, and suggests that firms' online marketing strategies should be contingent on product and consumer characteristics. The authors discuss the implications of these results in light of the increased share of niche products in recent years.
Electronic commerce (E-commerce) is sharing business information, maintaining business relationships, and conducting business transactions by means of telecommunications networks. Traditional E-commerce, conducted with the use of information technologies centering on electronic data interchange (EDI) over proprietary value-added networks, is rapidly moving to the Internet. The Internet's World Wide Web has become the prime driver of contemporary E-commerce. This paper presents a hierarchical framework of E-commerce, consisting of three meta-levels: infrastructure, services, and products and structures, which, in turn, consist of seven functional levels. These levels of E-commerce development, as well as of analysis, range from the wide-area telecommunications infrastructure to electronic marketplaces and electronic hierarchies enabled by E-commerce. Several nodal problems are discussed that will define future development in E-commerce, including integrating electronic payment into the buying process, building a consumer marketplace, the governance of electronic business, and the new intermediation. The paper also introduces the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, which will provide an integrated view of the new E-commerce.
Over the past decade, electronic commerce on the technological foundation of the Web-Internet compound has entered extensive areas of organizational and social activity. This broad-based organizational and technological development requires categorization in order to be understood in its entirety and exploited fully. The principal aspects of e-commerce are identified in five domains: commerce, collaboration, communication, connection, and computation. These aspects lead to specific innovational opportunities that can be exploited to organize and address marketplaces, offer innovative products, collaborate with business partners, transform business processes, and organize the delivery of information-system services. The result is a comprehensive framework of e-commerce as a technologically based means to business transformation and a metadisciplinary research field.
Investments to increase the level of explicit coordination with outside agents have generally resulted in increased risk to the firm; firms have traditionally avoided this increased risk by becoming vertically integrated or by underinvesting in coordination. This paper argues that information technology (IT) has the ability to lower coordination cost without increasing the associated transactions risk, leading to more outsourcing and less vertically integrated firms. Lower relationship-specificity of IT investments and a better monitoring capability imply that firms can more safely invest in information technology for interfirm coordination than in traditional investments for explicit coordination such as co-located facilities or specialized human resources; firms are therefore more likely to coordinate with suppliers without requiring ownership to reduce their risk. This enables them to benefit from production economies of large specialized suppliers. Moreover, rapid reduction in the cost of IT and reduction in the transactions risk of explicit coordination makes possible substantially more use of explicit coordination with suppliers. The resulting transaction economies of scale, learning curve effects, and other factors favor a move toward long-term relationships with a smaller set of suppliers. We call this combination--a move to more outsourcing, but from a reduced set of stable partnerships--the "move to the middle" hypothesis.
User-generated content has been hailed by some as a democratizing force that enables consumers to discuss niche products that were previously ignored by mainstream media. Nevertheless, the extent to which consumers truly prefer to use these new outlets to discuss lesser-known products as opposed to spending most of their energies on discussing widely marketed or already successful products has so far remained an open question. We explore this question by investigating how a population's propensity to contribute postconsumption online reviews for different products of the same category (motion pictures) relates to various indicators of those products' popularity. We discover that, ceteris paribus, consumers prefer to post reviews for products that are less available and less successful in the market. At the same time, however, they are also more likely to contribute reviews for products that many other people have already commented on online. The presence of these two opposite forces leads to a U-shaped relationship between a population's average propensity to review a movie postconsumption and that movie's box office revenues: moviegoers appear to be more likely to contribute reviews for very obscure movies but also for very high-grossing movies. Our findings suggest that online forum designers who wish to increase the contribution of user reviews for lesser-known products should make information about the volume of previously posted reviews a less-prominent feature of their sites.
Enabled by the Internet-Web compound, co-creation of value by consumers has emerged as a major force in the marketplace. In sponsored co-creation, which takes place at the behest of producers, the activities of consumers drive or support the producers' business models. Autonomous co-creation is a wide range of consumer activities that amount to consumer-side production of value. Thus, individuals and communities have become a significant, and growing, productive force in e-commerce. To recognize co-creation, so broadly understood, as a fundamental area of e-commerce research, it is necessary to attain an integrated research perspective on this greatly varied, yet cohering, domain. The enabling information technology needs to be developed to suit the context. Toward these ends, the paper analyzes the intellectual space underlying co-creation research and proposes an inclusive taxonomy of Web-based co-creation, informed both by the extant multidisciplinary research and by results obtained in the natural laboratory of the Web. The essential directions of co-creation research are outlined, and some promising avenues of future work discussed. The taxonomic framework and the research perspective lay a foundation for the future development of co-creation theory and practice. The certainty of turbulent developments in e-commerce means that the taxonomic framework will require ongoing revision and expansion, as will any future framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
From introduction: "Daddy is saying `Holy moly!' to his computer again!" "Those words have become a family code for the way my virtual community has infiltrated our real world. My seven-year-old daughter knows that her father congregates with a family of invisible friends who seem to gather in his computer. Sometimes he talks to them, even if nobody else can see them. And she knows that these invisible friends sometimes show up in the flesh, materializing from the next block or the other side of the planet. "Since the summer of 1985, for an average of two hours a day, seven days a week, I've been plugging my personal computer into my telephone and making contact with the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link)--a computer conferencing system that enables people around the world to carry on public conversations and exchange private electronic mail (e-mail). The idea of a community accessible only via my computer screen sounded cold to me at first, but I learned quickly that people can feel passionately about e-mail and computer conferences. I've become one of them. I care about these people I met through my computer, and I care deeply about the future of the medium that enables us to assemble. "I'm not alone in this emotional attachment to an apparently bloodless technological ritual. Millions of people on every continent also participate in the computer-mediated social groups known as virtual communities, and this population is growing fast. Finding the WELL was like discovering a cozy little world that had been flourishing without me, hidden within the walls of my house; an entire cast of characters welcomed me to the troupe with great merriment as soon as I found the secret door. Like others who fell into the WELL, I soon discovered that I was audience, performer, and scriptwriter, along with my companions, in an ongoing improvisation. A full-scale subculture was growing on the other side of my telephone jack, and they invited me to help create something new."
With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing-and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained-or lost-by the decisions we make today.
The creation of online consumer communities to provide product reviews and advice has been touted as an important, albeit somewhat expensive component of Internet retail strategies. In this paper, we characterize reviewer behavior at two popular Internet sites and examine the effect of consumer reviews on firms' sales. We use publicly available data from the two leading online booksellers, Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com, to construct measures of each firm's sales of individual books. We also gather extensive consumer review data at the two sites. First, we characterize the reviewer behavior on the two sites such as the distribution of the number of ratings and the valence and length of ratings, as well as ratings across different subject categories. Second, we measure the effect of individual reviews on the relative shares of books across the two sites. We argue that our methodology of comparing the sales and reviews of a given book across Internet retailers allows us to improve on the existing literature by better capturing a causal relationship between word of mouth (reviews) and sales since we are able to difference out factors that affect the sales and word of mouth of both retailers, such as the book's quality. We examine the incremental sales effects of having reviews for a particular book versus not having reviews and also the differential sales effects of positive and negative reviews. Our large database of books also allows us to control for other important confounding factors such as differences across the sites in prices and shipping times.
Innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users—both individuals and firms—often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all. The trend toward democratized innovation can be seen in software and information products—most notably in the free and open-source software movement—but also in physical products. Von Hippel's many examples of user innovation in action range from surgical equipment to surfboards to software security features. He shows that product and service development is concentrated among "lead users," who are ahead on marketplace trends and whose innovations are often commercially attractive. Von Hippel argues that manufacturers should redesign their innovation processes and that they should systematically seek out innovations developed by users. He points to businesses—the custom semiconductor industry is one example—that have learned to assist user-innovators by providing them with toolkits for developing new products. User innovation has a positive impact on social welfare, and von Hippel proposes that government policies, including R&D subsidies and tax credits, should be realigned to eliminate biases against it. The goal of a democratized user-centered innovation system, says von Hippel, is well worth striving for. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.
action costs, leading to more efficient, "friction-free" markets. Table 1. Functions of a market Internet Economics Matching buyers and sellers . Determination of product offerings - Product features offered by sellers - Aggregation of different products . Search (of buyers for sellers and of sellers for buyers) - Price and product information - Matching seller offerings with buyer preferences . Price discovery - Process and outcome in determination of prices Facilitation of transactions . Logistics - Delivery of information, good, or service to buyer . Settlement - Transfer of payment to seller . Trust - Credit system, reputations, rating agencies like Consumer Reports and Better Business Bureaus Institutional infrastucture . Legal - Commercial code, contract law, dispute resolution, intellectual property protection . Regulatory - Rules and regulations, monitoring, enforcement produ
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